Alma Alexander

Alma Alexander, the 'Duchess of Fantasy,' was born on the banks of an ancient river in a country which no longer exists. When she was ten, her family left Europe and moved to Africa. Since then she has lived in several countries on four continents and now lives in America with a husband she met on the Internet

She has written three million words in more than 20 books and one of her novels, "The Secrets of Jin-shei," has been published around the world in 14 languages. The heroine of her popular Young Adult Worldweavers series is as American as Harry Potter is British. The first book in another young adult series about a shape-shifting Were family will be published shortly.

When asked what she would be if she weren't a writer, she quotes Ursula LeGuin's answer to that question: "Dead."

Alma is a punaholic and a chronic worrier, one of those people who proves that real pessimists are truly born and not made. She is owned by a cat. She was born on the fifth day of July (the day after America), six years before man walked on the moon, which makes her a cancer according to the Western horoscope and a water rabbit according to the Chinese one.

In one of the most polarizing (series of) books I know, books which you either despise or passionately defend against all blasphemers, there is a character known as… Thomas Covenant. I am in THAT camp. The one over there. The … Continue reading →
The post Must he be likeable? appeared first on Alma Alexander: Duchess of Fantasy.

After a bit of nudging from Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, neuroscientist Sam Harris selects:
12 Books Every Intelligent Person Should Read
“From Bertrand Russell to the Buddha, or why you should spend a weekend reading the Qur’an,” the subtitle says.
Illustration by Marc Johns
I don’t know. It all sounds a tad pretentious to me. “Every intelligent person”? By whose reckoning? I consider myself both intelligent and educated and I think I might have a problem r

Photo from JetBlue
As part of its Soar With Reading program, Laura Willard reports at Upwothy, JetBlue is placing book vending machines in communities it calls book deserts.
The machines are stocked with books, and the kids can take as many as they want, free of charge. To get started, they’re putting three vending machines at different locations in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C.
Read the whole story HERE
~~~~~ The Beginning of Little Free

At OMGfacts, Dominic Trombino offers us 21 Photos of the Places Where One Country Ends and Another Begins
National borders can change very drastically awfully quickly, and when you see the actual borders you can often tell a lot about the two (or more) countries there.
As here: Haiti and The Dominican Republic, which have very different environmental protection laws
And sometimes not so much. As here Norway and Sweden
See all the photos HERE <

At The Literacy Site, Will S. examined: What Science Is Saying About Fiction Readers
Among other things, he noted that the authors of one study said that what you choose to read is important:
“We believe that one critical difference between lit and pop fiction is the extent to which the characters are complex, ambiguous, difficult to get to know, etc. (in other words, human) versus stereotyped, simple…”
i.e, What they are saying is that it’s literary fiction vs g

Malala Yousafzai
Nobel prize winner Malala Yousafzai notes that
Just eight days of military spending could educate the world
To bring attention to that, she has launched the #BooksNotBullets hashtag and asks people to post a photo of themselves holding one of their favorite books and a statement on why they prefer “books not bullets.”
Anyone here want to add their selfie?
Read more HERE
~~~~~ At Buzzfeed, Farrah Penn gives us
11 Ch

It’s been said on the Internet that the BBC believes that most people will have read only six of the 100 books below. Extraordinary, but you have to believe it because everyone knows that everything on the Internet is absolutely true.
Actually, List Challenges reports, the BBC never claimed that, and the list of books isn’t really their list. It was created by an unknown individual and spread around the internet as a meme called “The BBC Book List Challenge.” It was probably loosely b

Buzzfeed Books asked subscribers of their newsletter to tell them about a book that they couldn’t put down. One reader talked about taking her choice to work and pretending to search her purse for something just so she could read … Continue reading →
The post Unputable downable appeared first on Alma Alexander: Duchess of Fantasy.

Few benefits of the e-reader are as attractive as the privacy it affords, Calum Marsh writes at The Guardian, so after the launch of the Kindle, erotic romance really took off.
An erotica publication geared towards the male market. Photograph: Ellora’s Cave
In public the anonymity is ironclad: you could be reading hardcore BDSM erotica on your Kindle or Kobo, but to your fellow commuters you might as well be poring over PG Wodehouse.
Print versions of erotica are mainl

What is it that makes certain stories last?
That’s a question that Neil Gaiman explores in a lecture two and a half years in the making, part of the Long Now Foundation’s nourishing and necessary seminars on long-term thinking, an article in Brain Pickings tells us. Gaiman suggests that stories are a life-form obeying the same rules of genesis, reproduction, and propagation that organic matter does. “Stories are alive – they can, and do, outlive even the world’s oldest living tr